Streamlining an IRAF data reduction process with AstroPy and NDMapper

In the course of re-writing my typical top-level GMOS-IFU data reduction sequence in Python for a research project, I have developed a small module that helps express the scientific process in a relatively intuitive way as a Pythonic series of operations on NDData collections, mapped to files, with existing IRAF steps integrated almost seamlessly (pending their eventual replacement). For scientific end-user purposes, this experiment aims to obviate a need for pipeline machinery, favouring simple control flow in the main script and retaining a smooth transition from high-level process description to lower-level libraries by encapsulating necessary bookeeping within the data representation and simple wrappers. The I/O abstraction should make support for file formats other than FITS (eg. ASDF) straightforward to add. This work-in-progress can be found at https://github.com/jehturner/ndmapper and I intend to split its functionality involving IRAF or instrument processing into a separate "ndprocess" module as the prototype nears completion, leaving a core "ndmapper" package, without any special dependencies, as a general add-on for nddata.